About the project
A top–down shooter under a fixed Diablo camera, and an exercise in making an animation set that does not exist. Movement and aim are separate — the keys drive him around the world, the mouse decides which way he faces — so he spends most of his time walking in a direction he is not looking in, and a single forward cycle is nowhere near enough. The character came off Sketchfab with seven animations on it and none of them covered jumping, strafing, backpedalling or firing, so those were built out of the poses of the clips that did exist: the backpedal plays the legs in reverse against a forward–playing torso, the strafe yaws the hips sixty–eight degrees and counter–yaws the spine back over three joints, and the jump comes from pushing a stand–to–squat blend past both of its ends, so the legs go straighter than standing and the knees fold deeper than the squat without either pose being drawn by hand. Three faults in that set — a crouch that was really a forward hunch, a second attempt that folded him double, a recoil too small to see — raised no error at all and were found only by rendering contact sheets and looking at them. The firing animation plays on the spine and arms alone, filtered from the skeleton’s own track names at load, so he keeps running while he shoots.